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0100100100101101 · 6 years

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At the beginning of Detroit: Become Human, a video game about American androids fighting for equal rights, a character looks out from the television screen and says, directly to the player, “Remember: This is not just a story. This is our future.”

It’s a bold claim. As Detroit’s story unfolds, the game switches between three different androids: household servant turned revolutionary leader Markus; Kara, a robot fleeing from government persecution with the abused child she rescued from her former boss; and Connor, an agent of the delightfully named megacorp CyberLife who hunts down “deviant androids” disobeying their programming. Through their perspectives, we’re meant to observe a technological future the game wants us to believe is, in fact, soon to come. Connor’s character may sound familiar. That’s because he’s essentially a recast of Rick Deckard, the titular Blade Runner from Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic. In each case, Deckard and Connor are hunting aberrant robots, capturing and/or killing those who have broken free of their programming and attempting to live outside their intended roles as servants to humanity.

In both Detroit and Blade Runner the point of these robot hunters is to introduce the question of what separates humanity from a synthetic being so emotionally and intellectually advanced that it is indistinguishable from any member of our species. By the time we’ve watched the monologue from Blade Runner’s bleach blond “replicant” robot Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) about his memories vanishing “like tears in rain,” any hint of inhumanity feels irrelevant. He, like the soulful androids who populate Detroit, remembers his past in the same way we do. He loves. He can be sad. He thinks about his own mortality. The movie ends with the audience having been convinced that a robot with incredibly advanced artificial intelligence deserves to be treated better than a defective home appliance. Blade Runner, it bears repeating, was released in 1982. Detroit: Become Human came out May of this year.

Again and again, Detroit attempts to pull its sci-fi storyline into the real world to convey the same message Blade Runner accomplished so many years ago. It evokes the American civil rights movement (its future Michigan features segregated shops and public transit where androids are kept to the back of city buses; one chapter is even called “Freedom March”), American slavery (the horrific abuses visited on the androids by their masters are regular enough to become numbing), and the Holocaust (extermination camps are set up to house revolutionary androids near the game’s finale) in order to do so. Others have done a great job running down the myriad ways in which Detroit fails in its evocation of the civil rights movement and class-based civil unrest. The poor taste inherent in its decision to make tone-deaf comparisons between its (multi-ethnic, apparently secular) robots and some of human history’s most reprehensible moments of violent prejudice is grotesque enough on its own. But it’s worth noting that on a dramatic level, Detroit also falls completely flat.

Its central point, presented with the satisfied air of a toddler smugly revealing that the family dog feels pain when you yank its tail, is that an android with a sophisticated sense of the world and itself deserves the same rights as any human. This seems like a philosophical problem that ought to have been put to bed around the time Blade Runner made the “dilemma” of android humanity part of mainstream pop culture. For decades now, audiences have watched, read, and played through stories that very persuasively argue there’s no good moral case for treating sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence—especially when housed in an independently thinking and feeling robot body—like dirt. To watch Roy Batty die in Blade Runner and feel nothing isn’t a failure of social and cultural empathy, but the viewer for just kind of being a monster. To release a video game in 2018 where players are honestly expected to experience conflicting emotions or a sense of emotional revelation when a completely humanistic robot is tortured or killed in cold blood ignores decades of genre-advancing history.

Even outside popular art, the past few decades have seen seismic shifts in our relationship with technology that should be impossible to ignore. In the ’80s, a home computer was revolutionary. Now, we live in an era where it’s completely mundane to ask talking boxes for trivia answers and maintain digital extensions of our personae on websites accessed through portable phones. We are not as suspicious of technology as we once were. It’s a part of us now—something we live with.

This shift is pretty clear in other areas of pop culture. Westworld—one of the highest profile sci-fi works in recent years—spent much of its first season retreading some of the same familiar ground as Detroit, but has found a more interesting path as it’s continued onward. While early episodes floundered with dramatically inert questions of whether sexually assaulting, torturing, and murdering lifelike thinking and feeling robots was an okay premise for an amusement park, it’s since moved on from hammering home the simplistic, insultingly moralizing lesson that “treating humanoid androids badly is the wrong thing to do.” At its best, characters like the show’s standout, Bernard Lowe—a tortured robot who is very well aware he is a robot—bring a welcome complexity.

Bernard, in actor Jeffrey Wright’s strongest performance to date, alternates naturally between a machine’s cold, vacant-eyed calculations and the trembling pathos of an android traumatized not only by the loss of his family and the violence of the world in which he lives, but also the knowledge that his memories are artificially coded and that his programming has led him to contribute to the horror of his surroundings. With this focus, viewers are given scenes far more philosophically troubling than the show’s earlier attempts to question whether it’s all right to kill humanlike robots for fun. In season two’s “Les Écorchés,” for example, Bernard is sat in a diagnostic interrogation and tormented by park co-creator Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), who, apparently, has entered his system in the form of a viral digital consciousness. Ford flits about his mind like a demonic possession. Bernard remembers killing others while under the intruder’s control. He cries and shakes like any human wracked with so much psychological pain would. “It’s like he’s trying to debug himself,” a technician notes. A digital read-out of Bernard’s synthetic brain shows his consciousness is “heavily fragmented,” as if under attack from a computer virus.

Rather than focus on simple ideas, the show acknowledges, in instances like these, that its audience is willing to accept an android character like Bernard as “human” enough to deserve empathy while remembering, too, that his mechanical nature introduces more compelling dramatic possibilities. Thankfully, Westworld’s second season has leaned further into this direction, moving (albeit at a glacial pace) toward stories about what it means for robots to embrace their freedom while being both deeply human and, due to their computerized nature, still fundamentally alien. By the end of the season, its earlier concern with flat moral questions has largely been swept away. Its finale, while still prone to narrative cliché elsewhere, shows a greater willingness to delve into explorations of how concepts like free will, mortality, and the nature of reality function for the computerized minds of its characters.

This is the sort of thing that elevates modern sci-fi, that reaffirms its potential for valuable speculation rather than just being a place to indulge familiar tropes and revisit nostalgic aesthetics. We see it in games like Nier: Automata, whose anime-tinged action is set in a far-future world where humanity has gone extinct, leaving behind only androids who must grapple with their minds persisting over centuries of samsara-like cycles of endless war against simpler machines trying to come to grips with their own intellectual awakening. We see it in Soma, which explores similar territory and turns it into soul-shaking horror by telling a story where people’s minds have been transplanted into synthetic consciousnesses, stored immortally on computers that reside in facilities dotting the inky depths of the ocean floor while the Earth dies out far above them. Like Bernard—and like many of the other characters now freeing themselves from both their shackles as Westworld’s park “hosts” and the narrative constraints of the show’s earlier episodes—these games transcend the outdated concerns of a story like Detroit. They give us something new to chew on, concerns that are not only intellectually fuller but also more reflective of where we are now as a technology-dependent species.

There’s no better summary of this change than the extremely belated Blade Runner sequel, Blade Runner 2049. Its predecessor was devoted entirely to convincing audiences that its assumedly inhuman replicants are worthy of empathy. It ended by asking if we’d even be able to tell the difference between a flesh-and-blood person and a synthetic one. Compare that to 2049, where protagonist K—Ryan Gosling playing a character with a suitably product-line-style name—is shown to be an android almost from the start. The plot of the film centers (like Detroit and Westworld) on a fast-approaching revolution where self-sufficient androids will overthrow their human creators, but the heart of its story is about the psychology of artificially intelligent beings. K is depicted as deeply troubled, grasping for affection from the mass-market hologram AI he’s in love with, grappling with the fact that he might be the first replicant to be born from another android, hoping to connect with his possible father, and being tormented by his inability to distinguish between what’s been programmed into his synthetic mind and what’s a “real” memory.

Blade Runner 2049 considers it a given that modern audiences can empathize with this android character without prerequisite arguments—that we’re not instinctively terrified of what he represents but willing to think about what such a creation means when set against age-old concepts of love and selfhood. As a sequel to the movie that did so much to settle questions about whether a robotic being was equal to humanity, it moves its concerns forward in tandem with society itself.

There’s a scene in 2049 where K, having learned of the existence of the first replicant child to be born of two replicant parents, is asked by his boss, Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright), to homicidally erase this revolutionary evidence in order to maintain the world’s status quo. K says he’s never killed something “born” before. When asked why that makes him uncomfortable, he replies that being born means having a soul—that that may be a crucial difference. “You’ve been getting on fine without one,” Joshi says. “What’s that, madam?” K replies. “A soul.”

It’s an exchange that takes moments, but it’s enough to communicate more about the nature of an AI consciousness than Detroit manages over its dozen hours. In these few words, 2049 puts an old debate to rest while raising new questions about what it means for a machine to worry about its place in the world. K doesn’t “have a soul” in the traditional sense, but he is tortured by the knowledge that he, with his need to love and be loved, may possess something quite like it. Modern science fiction is capable of asking us to explore what it means to view technology this way. It’s able to make us consider how our sense of reality may or may not intersect with the ever-more complex computers we create. It is, basically, able to do a lot more than revisit tired questions about whether the kind of highly advanced robots that populate Detroit: Become Human are worth taking seriously enough to care about in the first place.

#cyberpunk #nierautomota #sciencefiction #science fiction #scifi #gaming #androids #nier automata #detroit become human #detroitbecomehuman #blade runner #bladerunner #blade runner 2049 #bladerunner2049 #deusex #ghostintheshell #ghost in the shell #deus ex

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cinemotions · 8 years

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animated Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichsson in Double Indemnity (1944) directed by Billy Wilder

Double Indemnity is a film noir co-written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, and produced by Buddy DeSylva and Joseph Sistrom. The screenplay was based on James M. Cain's 1943 novella of the same name, which originally appeared as an eight-part serial in Liberty magazine.

The film stars Fred MacMurray as an insurance salesman, Barbara Stanwyck as a provocative housewife who wishes her husband were dead, and Edward G. Robinson as a claims adjuster whose job is to find phony claims. The term "double indemnity" refers to a clause in certain life insurance policies that doubles the payout in rare cases when death is caused accidentally, such as while riding a railway.

Praised by many critics when first released, Double Indemnity was nominated for seven Academy Awards but did not win any. Widely regarded as a classic, it is often cited as a paradigmatic film noir and as having set the standard for the films that followed in that genre.

Deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the U.S. Library of Congress in 1992, Double Indemnity was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 1998, it was ranked #38 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 best American films of the 20th century, and in 2007 it placed 29th on their 10th Anniversary list.

Is Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson the greatest female character to ever grace the silver screen? The short, seemingly obvious, answer is yes: scheming, persuasive and intelligent, she’s fully rounded, complex and convincing – in part thanks to Stanwyck’s performance, but also due to director Billy Wilder’s vision for the movie.

Accepting the role was a bold move; Stanwyck was then one of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood, a status she’d attained through classic heroine roles. When she questioned Billy Wilder’s casting logic, the crafty director asked: “Well, are you a mouse or an actress?

It wasn’t just Stanwyck that needed convincing. Many actors were apprehensive about taking the opposite lead role – not because the material was bad, but because the film explored new and challenging ideas: chiefly the means, motive and opportunity for murder.

Wilder, along with screenwriter Raymond Chandler, adapted the screenplay from a novella by James M. Cain (also responsible for The Postman Always Rings Twice). Cain’s original text was inspired by a 1927 murder, in which married New York woman Ruth Snyder persuaded her boyfriend Judd Gray to kill her husband Albert – right after she took out an insurance policy with a double indemnity clause. The duo were swiftly apprehended, achieving nationwide fame thanks to a front-page photo that depicted Snyder’s execution.

In order for the film to be approved by the Hays Code, Wilder had to make some significant amends to Cain’s novella, most notably the end. By swapping an the concluding execution scene for a double murder in which neither lead enjoys redemption, Wilder managed to prove he wasn’t condoning murder, simply examining possible motivations.

What’s surprising is the amount of ‘erotica’ Wilder was able to convey. Stanwyck, who couldn’t just help but be sensual (whatever ‘it’ is, she had it in spades), is alluring from the first swish of her just-in-from-the-sun bath towel. Insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is captivated by Dietrichson’s light-catching anklet, that Wilder’s camera introduces through a tracking shot that lingers on her shapely legs as she descends the staircase. It’s a simple but effective introduction – a seemingly innocuous trinket that is anything but, and speaks volumes about Dietrichson’s exoticism and cavalier sensuality.

The anklet gets to Neff. “But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson,” he says in voiceover. “And the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg.” (Note the fetishist element of ‘cut’). It’s meant to get to the audience too – both Neff and the camera shape the audience’s perception of Dietrichson as a lustful object. Both enjoy looking at he; she’s as much object as individual, a trope that’s reinforced by Neff’s repeated (and overuse) of ‘baby’ later on in the film. Yet at the beginning, it’s Dietrichson herself who’s invited this attention; aware of the effect she can have of men, she is a self-constructed fantasy figure. In fact, there’s nothing oppressed about Phyllis.

That simple anklet also symbolises Dietrichson’s attitude to her marriage. She describes herself as a ‘caged animal’: “I feel as if he was watching me. Not that he cares, anymore. But he keeps me on a leash so tight I can’t breathe.” Trapped in what she perceives as a loveless marriage and constrained (and bored) by the conventions that society places on wives, her only solution is extreme action. In some ways,

Double Indemnity is a critique of marriage – by emphasising that sex and sensuality can’t exist within the safety (and relative dullness) of convention and family, and that sensual women can’t fulfil both personal and society expectations, it brings the entire practice into question. The presence of Lola (Jean Heather) – a child from a previous marriage – only heightens the sense that Dietrichson’s marriage is devoid of sexual desire, and that it’s the woman to blame. Defiant females, unable (or unwilling) to fit their prescribed mould, are forced into extreme acts that will not offer redemption but are punished – in this case by death.

But this perceived lack of sexuality is directly at odds with Dietrichson’s cultivated image. It’s not just the anklet. Everything about her is uniquely sensual, an image created and maintained through considered attire, mannerisms, words and actions. During the final scenes, Lola accuses her stepmother of murdering her father, an accusation based on the fact that she saw Dietrichson modelling a funeral hat in the days leading up to his death. Pretty damming evidence, but to a party unaware of the actual events, it would seem like a natural act for a woman so determined (but unable to) control her perception.

Although the lustful and infatuated Neff concocts the plan to ‘save’ Dietrichson and kill her husband, she certainly plants the seed. Is he blinded by love and greed? Or is he too an opportunist, using Dietrichson in the same way that she’s using him, a mutually beneficial relationship in which both instigators are guilty yet doomed. The traditional view is that he’s simply manipulated into action, yet there’s something in Neff’s manner that doesn’t seem like love – he’s aloof and sometimes cold. The right platitudes and sayings come too easily to be real. Certainly after the murder the relationship changes. Dietrichson is convinced that their relationship is being pulled apart, rather than together, Neff’s ‘shut-up’ kiss is, on the surface, an indication of his love, but in reality it’s just a way to control her. Yet Dietrichson isn’t above manipulation herself. She admits:

No, I never loved you Walter – not you or anybody else. I’m rotten to the heart. I used you, just as you said. That’s all you ever meant to me. Until a minute ago, when I couldn’t fire that second shot.

There’s a lack of genuine feeling between both. In fact, it’s Neff’s relationship with his colleague Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) that’s the humanising element. The relationship might stem from Neff’s fear that Keyes is the only one who can ‘solve’ their perfect murder, but there’s an authenticity to his emotion, real affection and respect, that’s never present in his dealings with Dietrichson. If her aforementioned statement is to be taken at face value, she, in contrast, has no real emotional ties to anyone, surely the very quality that enabled her to murder the first Mrs Dietrichson (or so the audience is led to believe).Roger Ebert suggests the two are simply playing to a style they’ve ‘learned in the movies, and from radio and the detective magazines’; that by deliberately making them one-dimensional pulp characters, Wilder was creating a sardonic comedy in which Dietrichson and Neff play a bad joke on themselves.

But that’s short-changing both characters. The ‘studied’ aspects are simply another facet of their real-ness. Dietrichson chooses objectification. She understands her position in society and who (or what) she needs to use to improve it. Everything – from the anklet to the blonde coiffure – is deliberate and considered. Neff is knowingly manipulated, happy to be a pawn as he stands to gain too. Yet who is it the audience feels most sympathy for and understanding towards? This is very much Neff’s story – as the narrator he controls the audience’s perception, the pace and takes on the ‘hero’ role through his sentimental and prolonged death scene. By removing the audience from direct (inter)action with Dietrichson it’s impossible to get to ‘know’ her, she remains an enigma, a symbol of fallen womanhood, a moral that crime doesn’t pay. Not giving Dietrichson a chance to fully explain her actions undermines the progressive elements of her character. The truth is that her undoing was the result of trusting – or at least enlisting – the help of a man, and even her death is viewed through the ‘male’ gaze.

And that’s the reason why Phyllis Dietrichson can’t claim ‘the greatest female character to ever grace the silver screen’ crown. Our perception and interpretation of her is shaped by a man and despite the apparent progressive qualities she displays, her treatment and actions actually uphold tradition and patriarchy. Hollywood had a fascination with ‘strong’ female characters, but only when they could be controlled. After all, movies aren’t meant to incite cultural change… are they?

(from girlsdofilm.wordpress.com)

#animation #Barbara Stanwyck #cinema #Double Indemnity #Billy Wilder #noir #Raymond Chandler #James M. Cain

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